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Breakaway stays are intended for adolescents under child welfare services (Ase), whom educators consider they no longer fit within conventional care structures. The aim sought by these services is paradoxically to break with the cycle of disruption so characteristic of these adolescents’ – institutional trajectories – through spatial and relational rupture. Based on a year-long ethnographic study conducted in one of these stays, this article highlights the intersecting perceptions of thirteen educators and eleven placed youths regarding this mechanism, which is presented as a last resort to redirect these young people towards greater stability. The study aims to understand how their respective conceptions and uses of “rupture” are articulated within a constrained timeframe, while also capturing the experiences of adolescents who do not undergo the expected redirection but come to experience their stay through the lens of waiting and disillusionment.